I read Drood in a state of perpetual anticipation last week, expecting some kind of terrible and dramatic conclusion, only to end up feeling gypped. As a book about Wilkie Collins’ opium addiction, it’s fairly interesting, though I would have liked to know more about his most significant hallucination, the “Other Wilkie.” As a book about the inspiration for Charles Dickens’ last novel, it’s only mediocre. And as an examination of fear in literature, it’s quite interesting.

I tend to think of horror as something that sometimes, but not necessarily, overlaps with fear. The idea of a lady with considerably tusks stalking up and down a stairwell and occasionally attacking the occupants of the residence is pretty awful to think about, but I’m not concerned that it’s going to happen to me. Similarly, I find the events of the Holocaust nauseating and essentially impossible to comprehend. But I don’t harbor serious concerns that I will be the victim of a similar effort at extermination. On the other hand, I find the possibility of the kind of murder Collins contemplates for much of the book simultaneously horrifying, and something I do think of as a frightening possibility, probably because I watch too many crime shows.

I tend not to find entertainment rooted solely in disgust-based horror engaging or watchable. I don’t find the events of movies like the Saw franchise plausibly frightening, but I’ve got no desire to watch them go down, either. I am not entertained by seeing disgusting, sadistic things happen to other people. If I’m going to watch that happen, I usually need some sort of moral reckoning, though the scale isn’t necessarily critical: the personal revelation of The Last King of Scotland, which I found hard to watch in sections, was definitely enough. Art that’s more about fear than about depictions of violence is harder to identify, I think. Zodiac works on that level, I think, because it’s not simply about fear of murder. It’s about fear of failure, of insignificance.

Drood is about some of those kinds of fear, mostly about fear of human capacity for evil. Wilkie’s scared of—and intrigued by—the possibility that Charles Dickens has committed a murder. He is scared of what will happen if he kills Dickens, and perhaps even more frightened of what will happen if he doesn’t. He fears the exposure of his domestic situations, the loss of his literary powers, being forgotten by history. By putting those fears on a scale, the book makes murder seem more accessible, just another bad thing that might happen in a potential litany of bad things.

But I think the book ultimately fails by retreating into ambiguity. I assume that the doubt about what had actually happened, and what is just Wilkie’s addiction-induced hallucinations is meant to leave readers nervous and uncertain, itchy with fear. Instead, it just feels vague. We don’t actually have an expanded sense of the capacities of these two great men for evil. And given how long dead they are, it’s hard to fear them, or what may have been their collective phantasm.

It really is quite unfortunate for The Eagle that Centurion came out earlier this fall. I’d pretty much guarantee that in every possible way, the earlier movie will be more: much more violent, weirder, and must more suspenseful. As much as I like me some Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender is a more grown-up sex symbol:

The thing is, there’s a lot of potential for awesome movies about Rome that don’t need to be set in cold, rainy, pre-Medieval England and populated with a lot of fetishized Picts. Some brilliant children’s movie director should really make a franchise out of Henry Winterfeld’s Detectives in Togas and The Mystery of the Roman Ransom books about a plucky group of Roman gentlemen’s sons (actually, someone should recognize the Hunger Games-induced potential of Trouble at Timpetill, Winterfeld’s book about a town where the parents abandon their children, leading to fascinating struggle between anarchy and civilization). You could do a ton with the whole Roman wife trope. Hell, we could go back to gladiatorial stories. We could even tell stories set back in Rome about the loss of the Ninth Legion, as The Mystery of the Roman Ransom is. In any case, maybe The Eagle is good. It’s just that of all the waves of movie topics to have, the Ninth Legion is one of the stranger possibilities.

Battle: Los Angeles certainly looks high-end and glossy, and I do rather like Aaron Eckhart, even though he sometimes embarrasses himself by being in very silly things:

But it illustrates a variant of the general problem with alien invasion movies. If you’re going to make the effort to invade a planet, traveling across time and space to do so, wouldn’t you want to do the basic reconnaissance to figure out where it makes most sense to strike? The Pentagon seems like a reasonably important thing to take out. If you want to disrupt the communications apparatus of the nation, New York makes a reasonable amount of sense. But Los Angeles? Why in God’s name would aliens prioritize destroying the world’s producer of mind-numbing entertainment? Hell, if you’re an invading force, you might want to preserve the narcotizing power of Hollywood.

And why would the military in Los Angeles be uniquely poised to strike back? The Long Beach Naval Yard’s been closed since 1997. There is an Air Force facility in Los Angeles, but why would it be uniquely innovative? Why would you focus on folks there in a wider invasion scenario? I hate to be a nitpicker. But it’s just so lazy, even if it is satisfying for the rest of the country to watch Venice Beach explode.